Hi folks,
Currently when working with NSAppleEventDescriptor it is necessary to
drop down to legacy or deprecated Carbon APIs in order to perform
certain tasks such as packing and unpacking date descriptors and sending
Apple events. Given Apple's regular Carbon API pogroms, it's an
uncomfortable foundation for building professional software products.
I'm putting together a Radar feature request requesting that
NSAppleEventDescriptor be enhanced to provide this missing
functionality, and writing the patch myself in the hope that a. this
expedites the process, and b. it gets done right.
Here's what I've got so far, implemented as a category on
NSAppleEventDescriptor so it's easy to test:
@interface NSAppleEventDescriptor (AEDescExtensions)
// Given a value, create and return an autoreleased NSAppleEventDescriptor
// that contains that value, with an appropriate type (typeLongDateTime,
// typeIEEE64BitFloatingPoint, or typeFileURL, respectively).
+ (instancetype)descriptorWithDate:(NSDate *)date;
+ (instancetype)descriptorWithDouble:(double)number;
+ (instancetype)descriptorWithFileURL:(NSURL *)fileURL;
// Given a target process identifier, create and return an autoreleased
// NSAppleEventDescriptor suitable for use in +appleEventWith... constructor
+ (instancetype)currentProcessDescriptor;
+ (instancetype)descriptorWithProcessID:(pid_t)pid;
+ (instancetype)descriptorWithApplicationURL:(NSURL *)url;
// AERecords can have an abitrary descriptorType. This allows you to
check if
// the descriptor is truly an AERecord.
- (BOOL)isRecordDescriptor;
// Return the contents of a descriptor, after coercing the descriptor's
contents
// to typeLongDateTime, typeIEEE64BitFloatingPoint, or typeFileURL
respectively.
@property (readonly) NSDate *dateValue;
@property (readonly) double doubleValue;
@property (readonly) NSURL *fileURLValue;
// Send an Apple event to a target process. On success, returns the
reply event
// containing the result value or error returned by the target process.
If an
// Apple Event Manager error occurs, returns nil and if `error` is not
nil an
// NSError containing the Carbon error code.
- (instancetype)sendAppleEventWithMode:(AESendMode)sendMode
timeout:(long)timeOutInTicks
error:(NSError * __autoreleasing *)error;
@end
These are the methods that wrap essential legacy/deprecated Carbon APIs:
+descriptorWithDate:
+currentProcessDescriptor
-isRecordDescriptor
-dateValue
-sendAppleEventWithMode:timeout:error:
The rest are simply for completeness: not essential, just convenient to
have.
The two source files that I'll submit as a code patch are here (you can
ignore the larger project):
https://bitbucket.org/hhas/appleeventbridge/src/635415adc0841f07a906f834c7d269109db8ce3f/AppleEventBridge/NSAppleEventDescriptor+AEDescExtensions.h?at=master
https://bitbucket.org/hhas/appleeventbridge/src/635415adc0841f07a906f834c7d269109db8ce3f/AppleEventBridge/NSAppleEventDescriptor+AEDescExtensions.m?at=master
If anyone can think of any other Apple event Carbon APIs that should be
added to this wrapper, please let me know. Ditto if you can see anything
stupid or wrong in my implementation. I'm also open to advice on how to
best present and document this code to make it as quick and painless for
Apple to implement (I figure the less effort it is for them, the
likelier they are to include it in [ideally] 10.11).
Thanks,
has
p.s. Anyone know if <rdar://problem/4976113> has been fixed? If it has,
I can eliminate the AESendThreadSafe workaround for sending events on
background threads.
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